Celebrated Storytellers

By Murali Kamma

May 2013

In an interview with Khabar at Emory University,
Salman Rushdie discusses Midnight’s Children, South
Asian writing, his memoir focusing on the fatwa
years, India’s rising intolerance, his ex-wives, what
filmmaking taught him about writing, and why he
criticized last year’s Nobel laureate in literature.

Neither Salman Rushdie nor Deepa Mehta needs an introduction. And their collaboration on the film Midnight’s Children, based on Rushdie’s classic novel, won’t come as news to cineastes. As for book lovers, well, some may still be wondering how they managed to adapt this multilayered literary work, which
Satyajit Ray once described as unfilmable. An epic-like tale numbering over 500 pages, Midnight’s Children spans six decades and three generations, not to
mention three wars—and it features quirky but
memorable characters, dense plotting, and a chutnified English that delighted readers and influenced the
way Indians wrote fiction.

Not to forget, Midnight’s Children has magic realism, along with a magical status in the postcolonial canon. Considered one of 20th century’s 100 best English-language novels, it won the Booker of Bookers in 1993, although it was the first Booker Prize—in 1981—that came as a jolt to the literary world, bringing wide
attention to Indian writing. Just as India Inc. began to rise in 1991, following the introduction of economic reforms, one could argue that India Ink got a boost from this masterpiece a decade earlier.

What Rushdie and Mehta have in common, apart from their artistry and an Indian ancestry, is that tho-ugh both have been embroiled in controversies, they are not daunted by obstacles—and, in fact, seem to thrive in a difficult environment. Their friendship
was the catalyst when they sealed the deal over a meal
for $1, which was Rushdie’s price for the movie
rights to Midnight’s Children. But the tenacity they share would have been a trigger, too, allowing them to take on a challenging project that’s clearly a labor of love.

It was interesting to hear you say [in Atlanta] that the film Midnight’s Children is a first cousin or a
relative of the novel. So it’s not an adaptation,
strictly speaking.
The novel is 600 pages long. If you were to fully dramatize that, you’d need 12 hours. That’s just a fact. There was no possibility of us having a trilogy, and we had the possibility to make just one feature film. The fact about the film world, which is very interesting, is that it’s very real. There are things people will give you money to film and there are things people will not give you money to film. At one point we did talk about making two movies, making it a two-part film. And the very first screenplay that I wrote was in that form. It was two movies of this length. Four years ago, David [Hamilton], Deepa, and I were all at the Toronto Film Festival shopping that idea, talking to money people, and so on. And we discovered very quickly—there was enormous enthusiasm for a film of Midnight’s Children. People said they were excited about it and said they wanted to get involved. And there was zero enthusiasm for two films. That’s why I think for me the challenge was to take this novel and try and say what is the heart of the book. That’s quite an interesting challenge.

There are people who say that literary novels like Midnight’s Children—unlike, say, a novel by Ian
Fleming or Chetan Bhagat—are not suitable for film adaptations.
There are books that are easier to film. You can see how a Bond novel, because it has an action-packed
narrative, is…well, it’s not easy because these are big, complicated films—but it’s more natural, if you like, to transition. But I’ve firmly believed that there’s no such thing as a book you can’t film. When I’ve been here at Emory over these years, one of the things I’ve done with Matthew Bernstein is to try and teach a course in the best case scenario of adaptation, because there are many films that fall short of a book. But sometimes that’s not true. For instance, I have come to think
that the films of the Lord of the Rings are better than the books. Peter Jackson’s film language is more lyrical, more sophisticated, more beautiful than Tolkien’s prose. So the storyline is the same, but the actual
telling is actually superior in the film than on the page.
You can see other examples of this.

What about Joseph Anton: A Memoir [which focuses on Rushdie’s fatwa years]? Do you think it can be turned into a movie?
You’ll have to wait and see. We haven’t signed a contract yet but there’s some pretty serious interest in doing it. Then we get into this ridiculous question of who’s going to play Salman Rushdie. I have no idea. Remember that whoever it is, he is not playing me as I am now but as I was 25 years ago.

Staying with Joseph Anton, those events took place when you were much younger. Why revisit that painful chapter now? Of course, as you noted, Emory played a role [by creating the Rushdie archive].
But were you trying to hit back at your critics?
To put it at its crudest, because it’s a good story. If you as a writer fall into the middle of a good story, at some point you have to tell that story. Also I wanted to be the first person to tell it. I wanted at least to say, here’s how it is from my point of view. And no doubt other people will have their say. That’s fair enough,
but at least I wanted to put it on the record—here’s what happened to me as I saw it. Beyond the personal stuff, I thought that this episode of The Satanic Verses
has echoes and ripples and connections to a much
larger subject, which is to do with the world we all live in now. The whole subject of the clash between intolerance and tolerance, the clash between art and oppression—this is an ancient subject. It is not the first time in the history of the world that writers have
been up against oppressive regimes. The story of the Soviet Union is one of the great stories of intellectuals being persecuted while they are also resisting. So here’s a subject we are all talking about now. And my little story feeds into that. So it becomes a way of not just talking about me but exploring that larger theme.

In a BBC interview last year, Rushdie noted that The Satanic Verses would not be published today, given the climate of “fear and nervousness.” In Joseph Anton: A Memoir, he revisits the so-called Rushdie Affair that changed his life.

And we see that intolerance in India, too. You were in India when there were attacks on a scholar, a filmmaker, even rock musicians…
Very much so. It’s very, very worrying, what’s happening in India. I would say there are three areas which I identified as being problematic. One is the rise of authoritarian governments in many of the major states. If you add Modi in
Gujarat, Shiv Sena in Bombay, Jayalalitha in Tamil Nadu, and Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal, you have these populist authoritarian governments
that are in many ways anti-democratic, occupying very important parts of the country. That spirit of authoritarianism
is moving closer to the center.

Second thing is these daily or almost weekly attacks on different forms of culture, whether it’s a scholar like Ashis Nandy or a filmmaker like Kamal Hassan. In fact, just last week there was this episode. The Indian Express ran an article criticizing some member of the Shiv Sena for supposed sexual offences. And the Shiv Sena’s reaction was to send an army down to the Indian Express to
attack their office building. So suddenly the police have to defend a major newspaper for doing the job of a newspaper. That’s what a journalist is supposed to do. In another India, a political party—told that one of its members was guilty of these offences—would say, ‘We’ll investigate that because clearly if that’s true it’s appalling, and we’ll investigate that.’ That would be the civilized response.
And then the thing that worries me almost as much is a kind of public apathy to these problems. With the [Delhi] rape there was a big uproar.

Even before that, there were protests against corruption.
Yes, the Anna Hazare thing. That’s true. But now, these cultural attacks take place—against Kamal Hassan, Ashis Nandy, M.F. Husain, Rohinton Mistry, that book about Shivaji, the girls playing a band [Pragaash] being stopped for being anti-Islamic …

Is PEN doing anything? I know you’re deeply involved with it.
Indian PEN is small, but they’re trying hard. I’m still running the festival, but I’m not any longer the president of PEN American Center. We have to try. It’s one of the things I’ve talked to them about. PEN is always trying to identify where in the world the problem is. And the problem shifts. Once upon a
time the Soviet Union was the place where the people were most concerned. Now you have to look at places like China and, unfortunately, India. Sometimes I felt what’s happening or what’s in danger of happening in India—let’s not overstate it—is some of the worst elements of Chinese state authoritarianism linking to some of the worst elements of Pakistani sectarian politics. Take the worst bits of the two countries on either side and push them together and get India. That shouldn’t happen, but it might.

That would be a nightmare. You mentioned China. But despite everything, India is still a democracy—whereas China is a very repressive country, despite all the economic growth. You criticized the 2012 Nobel laureate Mo Yan for not speaking out against Chinese
repression.
This does come back to PEN. Many
of us involved with PEN have fought very
hard on behalf of Chinese dissidents.
And it seemed very disquieting that the
Chinese Nobel laureate was unwilling
to join that struggle, a campaign which
many, many Nobel laureates have signed
up to. He made a particular remark,
which I thought was very unfortunate,
when he defended Chinese censorship
and compared it to security at airports,
[saying] censorship is like you’ve to go
through security checks at airports.
The reason we have security at airports
is to prevent terrorist attacks. That suggests
therefore that dissident literature
is to be compared to terrorism. For a Nobel
writer he should have a better command
of metaphor than that. I just think
it’s disappointing. I fully accept that
there are some writers whose temperament
is not to engage. It doesn’t make
them bad people. I’m very involved in
the battle against censorship. So to have
a Nobel laureate defend censorship is
very disappointing.

Coming back to Joseph Anton, you
use the third person instead of first
person. Didn’t you think that would diminish
the emotional impact of a very
personal story?
Not necessarily. I thought it might
increase it, actually. I wanted the book to
read like a novel and to create characters
on the page, even if they’re real people…
to create characters and incidents of drama
in the way that you would in a novel,
except that it’s true. I felt that to talk
about myself like that one step away was
a way for me to create myself as a character
on the page more easily. Another
writer might have thought differently. I
started out writing in the first person. I
didn’t like the way it sounded. In an autobiography,
the person called “I” feels
qualitatively different than the people
called “he” and “she.” The “I” stands out
so much because it’s an autobiography.
So I thought if the person who is myself
is referred to as “he,” just like everyone
else, then it becomes the same order of
character as everybody else in the book.
And it’s easier to write it. I just preferred
the tone of voice that it gave me.

By the way, I’m not the first person
to do it. There’s the memoir of J.M.
Coetzee that uses the third
person. And then of course
there’s the famous memoir of
Christopher Isherwood, Christopher
and His Kind, in which
he writes about himself in the
third person. Everything has
been done before. The Isherwood
book also reads very
novelistically. I’m sure that’s part of the
reason for doing it.

There’s a lot of humor in the book.
The police, for instance, provided not
just protection but comic relief as well.
Were you laughing back then, or is it
funny only when you look back?
I remember one of the things that I
would say to my friends quite frequently,
‘You know if it wasn’t for the fact that
this is not funny at all, it would be quite
funny.’ There were these strange moments
which were simultaneously funny
and not funny. There were surprising
moments of humor—the description of
my first visit to New York with the NYPD
going haywire all around me. It was
funny at the time. I remember my agent
and I were in the middle of all this police
mayhem, and we were laughing at it at
the time. But it’s black comedy, because
the larger subject is not funny.

Rushdie and Padma Lakshmi in
happier times. Their high-profile
marriage, about which he writes
in his memoir, lasted from
2004 to 2007.

The book is also about your family.
You write about your father, your ex-wives.
Were you concerned at all about
the reaction? And what was the reaction
like?
So far so good. First of all, I tried to
make sure that people were not blindsided.
My older son Zafar was one of the
first people to read it, partly because I
wanted him to feel okay about the portrait
of him and I wanted him to feel okay
about the portrait of his mother, who’s
no longer alive. I wanted him to feel
happy, and he was very happy actually.
My younger son’s mother Elizabeth was
probably the second person to read the
book. She made some suggestions and I incorporated almost all of them. She
had one or two things which she wanted
taken out, which I took out. Again, with
Padma Lakshmi, she didn’t have time
to read the book because she was busy
with her TV show. I sent her a long email
detailing everything about her that was
in the book, and she asked for one or two
things to be removed. Which I did, and
she seemed okay about the rest of it.

So you have
stayed in touch?
I’m in touch with
most of these people.
Marianne [the second
ex-wife] is the
only person I didn’t
clear anything with,
which you can see
why. But, no, there’s
been no response
from her. The point
is, I went to real trouble
to tell the truth.
I thought, don’t exaggerate
it, don’t overplay
it. Just make
sure that what you’re
saying is the truth
and is backed up by
facts, information
and evidence, and
so on. That’s the one
thing I’d say about the
book. Whether you
like it or you don’t
like it, you think it’s
too shocking, too open or too revelatory,
the fact is, my only principle was tell
the truth. And that’s the reason why
nobody has been able to come back at
me, because they know what I said is
what happened. It’s as close as I can
make it to what happened. As the author
of such a book, you have to be very
self-critical, because otherwise the book
reads like self-justification, like I was
great and everybody else not so much.
Nobody wants to read that.

What do you think of the latest crop
of Indian writers—like Jeet Thayil, Sonia
Faleiro, Aatish Taseer? How do they
compare with earlier writers?
Most of them I really like. I like Jeet—I like his book [Nacropolis] very much.
When I was in Bombay I was given Jerry
Pinto’s novel [Em and The Big Hoom],
which won the [2013] Hindu Prize. I think
it may be the best book to come out
of India in a long time.

What about Manu Joseph?
I haven’t read him. What is interesting
is that it seems like there’s another
one every week. Interestingly, now for
the first time there’s also a very talented
generation of young Pakistani writers—Mohammed Hanif, Nadeem Aslam,
Kamila Shamsie, Mohsin Hamid, Daniyal
Mueenuddin …. There’s suddenly a whole
generation of very gifted Pakistani writers.
While there’s been this great boom
of Indian writing in English, for a long
time it wasn’t happening in Pakistan.

What do you think accounts for the
sudden change?
Oddly, I think it’s to do with how bad
the situation is in Pakistan. Any writer
will tell you that the worse it is, the better
it is. The Soviet Union was an inspiration
to a number of great writers because
it was so oppressive. I think a number
of these Pakistani writers are political
in a way many of their contemporary
Indian counterparts are not. It’s as if in
this younger generation in India many of
the writers have veered away from that
public subject. Not all of them—Aravind
Adiga, for example, is obviously very satirical
of public themes. But if you look at
Jeet’s book or Jerry Pinto’s book, they’re
personal, interior books, not public subjects—whereas in Pakistan, because the
situation is so extreme, writers are taking
it on. It makes their writing very interesting
to me.

What’s your future at Emory?
I have three more years on this. I
had a five-year contract which ended
and I renewed for another five. I’ve done
two of them and I have three more. Then
we’ll see. Maybe they’ll fire me. [Laughs]

My last question goes back to Midnight’s
Children. Making movies is a very
collaborative effort, as you pointed out, and very different from writing novels.
Having now worked closely with Deepa
on this film, have you learnt anything
new about writing fiction?
I learnt an enormous amount. One
of the things that you focus on in screenwriting,
perhaps more than in book writing,
is how the audience will receive the
film. When you’re writing a screenplay,
essentially what you’re trying to do is to
grab the audience by the throat at the
beginning and just drag them through
the film until the end, and then they
say, ‘Oh, that was a good movie.’ In the
process of refining the script, there
are scenes that you may have liked as
scenes but you think they will somehow
break the flow—and in order to keep the
forward thrust going, you cannot stop
here. You have to remove this. What it
did was give me a much clearer sense
of how you relate to the reception of the
work. And that you can take back into
writing novels, too.

“I’m not going to
compromise my vision
because it’s going to
make it accessible.”
— Deepa Mehta

Deepa Mehta talks to
Khabar, also at Emory,
about Midnight’s Children,
her collaboration with
Rushdie, migration, the
quest for identity, India,
other filmmakers, the
portrayal of women in
films, and criticism.

“This is one big responsibility,” says Deepa Mehta, referring to her latest film. She is best known for her Elements trilogy comprising Fire, Earth, and Water.

There’s a lot of visual appeal in your film. It’s the opposite of a
drawing-room drama with a lot of dialogue. What’s the advantage of your style of filmmaking?
Films are different from books. And I think in films you show as opposed to talk about it. There are some films that need huge dialogue, but
those aren’t the films that I’m attracted to. I like to show things. Salman and I were talking about it earlier. My job is to show what’s not on the page. Even if you look at the script of Midnight’s Children that Salman has written, you see that there’s very little dialogue. That’s what’s exciting.

And it keeps moving.
It has to. It is 60 years of post-colonial
civilization, and before that. You
can’t just plod along.

The cast was strong, I thought. Did
Salman help you pick the cast?
It’s not about helping me pick. It’s
our film. I really wanted him to be there.
It was like, ‘This is Satya, whom I love.
Salman, what do you feel about Satya?’

And there are no big names.
We were looking at some of the big
names initially, but then it would have
become more about them. And because
this is an ensemble piece where
there are nineteen actors who have
equal parts, it wasn’t that easy to get big
actors—because then they were asking
for their parts to be bigger. So we thought
it best to stay with actors who were
right for the character, not the other
way. Salman was very helpful, very
sweet. I’d say something and he would
say, ‘Yes, it’s a good idea.’ And we’d
meet people for lunch in New York. It
was very important for me that he was
really a part of that process.

You mentioned that Salim in the
film is in search of his identity, just as
India is in search of its identity. And
you said you were attracted to that because
you were also in search of your
identity. Could you elaborate?
As an immigrant to Canada, to me
it became very important. I don’t know
how it is in the United States but as an
Indian or a brown person coming to
Canada, which is a white country, more
or less—and I’d left my family behind,
I did not migrate with them; I married
a Canadian when I came to Canada—
I really missed my family. Just because
my passport had changed I could not
stop thinking of myself as an Indian. I
did not think, ‘Now I’ve become a Canadian.’
It was not like that at all. So
the process of thinking differently, becoming
an Indian-Canadian from an
Indian, has taken me a long time. It did
not happen overnight because there are
so many things that I still haven’t come
to terms with. Cultural things, food
habits, smells I’m attracted to, the
clothes I’m attracted to, music. Music
for me is huge—I miss listening to FM
Indian radio. The little things—the
monsoon, the weather, the Delhi heat,
the hot breeze that you call the loo, which
is fascinating.

So the films are a way for you to relive
those experiences.
Not at all. My films are not about
nostalgia. The process of making that
choice and coming to terms with the
fact that that was the person I was and
I’m not necessarily that now—these are
the things of nostalgia, but they do not
make me who I am now. Now I think
of myself as a Canadian who happens
to be Indian. My films are about things
that concern me, about the world that’s
specific to India.

Are you also drawn to Indian-Canadians
and their stories?
Absolutely. My last film was Heaven
on Earth, which is about Indians in Canada.
[But] those are the formative years of
your life. I was born in India and I went to
school there, I went to university there,
and I got married there. So those are the
years that influence you.

You’ve said you’re a sucker for
India. But at the same time you faced
criticism in India. Your relationship has
not been happy all the time.
I feel very much at home there. Yes,
I’ve had problems with Indian politicians.
There’s a difference. I haven’t ever
had a feeling of being attacked by India,
ever. I don’t see mobs of Indians attacking
me. It’s never been by Indians, only
by politicians, usually fundamentalists.
That’s a big difference. I’ve also had a
lot of love from India, and also a lot of
criticism. But that’s the way it is. You do
something, you take the risks, and you
have to pay the price.

Yes, it seems like artists, filmmakers,
writers, scholars, and musicians
are becoming soft targets in India. We
saw that in India earlier this year. So
what can we do?
I can’t solve India’s problems, and
I’m not interested. Indians have to solve
their own problems. I can only say more
power to them. When that girl was
raped and murdered, that was the most
shocking thing I’d heard. Artistes getting
persecuted is nothing compared to
that. If Indians can’t do something about
that, can’t get vocal about that, then
there’s no hope.

You touched on the Delhi rape case. There has been some talk about how popular entertainment, including films, can add fuel by objectifying women, by turning them into sexual objects …
That’s ridiculous. I think that
argument is really silly. Then that’s
censorship, again. A lot of Bollywood films do objectify women. There’s no question about that. Women are sexual objects for them. But should they stop making them? Of course not. What kind of censorship is that? People should be adults and say, ‘I’m not going to see that, because it’s made by misogynists.’
You can say that but you can’t say, ‘Ban them and stop making them.’ Because that’s another reverse kind of clamping down on expression.

The novel Midnight’s Children is very complex, with multiple themes and characters, and with magic
realism, spanning six decades. Didn’t you think you’d lose something? Were you not attracted to the idea of simplifying it so that you can attract a broader audience, rather than making an art house film?
It’s not art house. It’s been sold in 32 countries all over the world. A lot of people are going to see it all over the world. And it has done pretty well. I think of an audience and say, I’d love people to see it. I’d love it to be very popular. But I’m not going to compromise my vision because it’s going to make it accessible. I did not want to make it into a Slumdog Millionaire. I did not want to make it into a Marigold Hotel. That’s objectifying India.

That’s not the kind of filmmaker you are, unless it’s a film like Bollywood/Hollywood.
Yes, that was great fun; I loved doing that. That wasn’t taking an iconic book and turning it into a frivolous, irreverent film, which was exactly what Bollywood/Hollywood was. I really enjoyed making
it. But is it a serious film? No. Is it irreverent?
Yes. Is it subversive? In many ways,
yes. But I didn’t ever think that I was going
to simplify this. And that’s why Salman
wrote the screenplay, because I felt
that he would be really true. He knows
cinema so well. He knows his own book,
too. The way he could be disrespectful to
his book nobody else could have been.

What was the idea of using him as
a narrator, because we never see Salman
in the movie?
I really wanted a Salim who was
older, who was sixty years old, looking
at his life. That is what happens in the
book, too. There is Salim telling the story
to Padma as he is writing it. This is a film.
How do I take him sitting and telling
his story to Padma and make it him
telling the story to a much wider audience,
and later? Not at the age of thirty
but at the age of sixty-five, let’s say.
We always had a narration. I tried many
actors, but it didn’t work. We recorded
them, put them in the picture, and
somehow they felt too studied, too actor-
y. They didn’t feel like it was Salim’s
voice, which is a voice that wasn’t performance.
I thought about it one night,
and I woke up in the morning and I
called Salman and said, ‘Let’s give it a
try with you narrating it.’ I felt, and still
do, that there’s a lot of Salman in Salim.
And he knows Salim. He said no. He really
didn’t want to do it. I really twisted
his arm and said, ‘Let’s try it. It’ll either
work or it won’t.’ So very reluctantly he
tried a few things and we put it in the
picture, and it felt really right.

What are some of your favorite
films? Have any filmmakers inspired
you?
The one filmmaker that really inspired
me was Satyajit Ray. There’s Guru
Dutt, who was fabulous. I really like
Martin Scorsese—he is brilliant. There’s
a Serbian filmmaker called Emir Kusturica,
whose film Underground really
influenced me when I was doing this
film. And his Time of the Gypsies also. It
is magic realism and it’s amazing.
But Underground, really, because it’s political
and its use of music is amazing.
Fatih Akin, who’s a German-Turkish
filmmaker, is very good. Some of the
younger filmmakers in India, like Vishal
Bhardwaj. I think he’s just brilliant—a unique and totally original voice.

You also mentioned Dibakar Banerjee.
Banerjee, yes, and Adoor Gopalakrishnan
from the South. They’re
fabulous.

You faced a lot of hurdles in making
this film.
No, we didn’t!

But you couldn’t shoot in India.
No, we didn’t want to shoot in India,
because India has changed so much.
There’s no way we could’ve got that
India, that Bombay. If you go to Bombay
today you can’t put a camera anywhere
without being hit by a high-rise
or an overpass or BMWs. We would
have ended up in a studio. It would
have been terrible. The same thing
with Delhi. It was impossible. But we
did shoot in India for three months at
the end. So it’s not true that we weren’t
allowed to shoot in India.

Now, there’s been criticism of Sri
Lanka, where you did shoot, because of
the human rights abuses there and the
way the civil war ended.
Of course. You think India is fine,
with its corruption? Come on, you can’t
say you won’t shoot in Sri Lanka because
it’s a human rights travesty.
There is no doubt about what has happened
and what continues to happen
with Tamils. It’s really reprehensible.
[But] you see India and say it’s fine?
Modi is fine? That poor girl who was
raped and murdered is fine? No accountability
is fine? Corruption is fine? Come
on, you can’t have double standards and
say India is perfect!

So what’s next? I think you’ve
talked about making an Indian-Canadian
film.
Yeah, I want to do this film about Indian
gangsters in India. And Salman is
going to play a little role in it. [Laughs]

Enjoyed reading Khabar magazine? Subscribe to Khabar and get a full digital copy of this Indian-American community magazine.